Dan Arey is the creative director over at Naughty Dog, and for GDC 2005 he put together a session on AAA games that interviewed numerous designers and collated their responses.
I didn’t answer all the questions, but I’ve finally gotten around to posting the ones I did answer in the Interviews section of the website. Some excerpts to whet the appetite:
…anymore, that is.
I took lessons for a while. In high school, I started out with keyboards, not guitar. It wasn’t until midway through my first year of college that I first picked up the guitar, which means that I have now been playing it for almost exactly 15 years.
While playing guitar, though, I did actually spend a semester taking piano. I did OK, I suppose, but I struggled in some ways. My hands aren’t very big — could barely reach a full octave with one hand. I have a childhood injury that left my right hand pinky and half of my ring finger numb, and the pinky in particular is lacking in agility.
I also took music theory and composition classes, which were heavily driven by the piano. And that’s where this came from.
And there we are… Whee!
“I’d like to thank the Academy for this honor…”
Yet another games conference, this one sponsored by ACM, with an eye towards a future games SIG.
Interesting that they chose to call it “sandbox,” given the turbulent opinions surrounding that tag within the gamer community itself.
The topics they are calling for papers on:
fredshouse.net: the medium that is eating the world is a summary of the talk I gave at PARC yesterday. Interesting that he felt that I was “was trying a bit too hard to be academic and researchy” — yikes, that was one of the least researchy versions of that talk I have ever given…! 🙂
Anyway, he took pretty good notes on the fly; alas, without all the jokes.
